Taming Tibet

Chinese citizens and state authorities were shocked and incensed by the violent demonstrations against Chinese rule in Lhasa in 2008 and were baffled by the Tibetans' seeming lack of gratitude for the country's significant development assistance. In her book Taming Tibet, Emily T. Yeh explores how Chinese construction initiatives in Tibet contributed to the consolidation of state power and territory. Yeh illustrates how the alteration of Tibet's material landscape between the 1950s and the first decade of the twenty-first century was frequently enacted via the labor of Tibetans themselves, drawing on sixteen months of anthropological fieldwork between 2000 and 2009. With a focus on Lhasa, Yeh demonstrates how efforts to support and enhance Tibetan livelihoods through market expansion, the subsidised construction of new homes, control over movement and space, and the education of Tibetan development desires have all interacted at various points in history and how they are felt in daily life.